The Electrical Filing Cabinet ... Most of Us Have One

So, in a powered down society, why would we want electricity anyway? Most of the things we'll be doing will be done by hand.

In Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs, I explore different options for generating electricity in the event the power grid goes down. I'm, personally, interested in becoming energy self-sufficient - partially because I don't like some of the ways the electricity I use is generated (nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas), and I don't want to be dependent on those, but also because the company that supplies our electricity to us acts just like every other corporation in this country and that is they view me as a "consumer" and therefore, they can do whatever they wish, and I can't complain because they believe the service they provide is invaluable to me, and I'm willing to just let them have their way as long as they keep giving me what they think I need. Fact is, I don't need their service for my personal health and well-being, and the more we do by hand, the less energy we'll need to be able to generate and the closer we come to being able to make our own. I'm really looking forward to the day when I can thumb my nose at them, by giving them a call and demanding they take their smart meters off my house.

Right now, I want to generate my own, because I don't want to be a slave to a corporation that doesn't care about me as a living, breathing being, but I don't think I'd be allowed to live here without any power at all. Long term, the desire to generate my own electricity has to do with the hope that I can keep a couple of important appliances running, but also because there is, at least, one gadget that is just handy to have, and that is, my computer.

I've had a computer for just about half my life. My first computer was a Sanyo something*something. It had two 5 1/4" floppy drives - one for the program disk and one to save my files. My guess is that a lot of people reading this won't know what any of that means.

My second computer was an awesome, state-of-the-art desk top with a harddrive. I thought I had something pretty special. I joined the Army. My computer went into storage for a year while I was in Basic and at AIT, and a year later, when I was reunited with my computer, it was already obsolete. No one was even using 5 1/4" floppys. They'd been replaced by 3 1/2" floppys, and they were quickly being phased out, too, in favor of bigger hard-drives.

The advances in computer technology moved really fast during that time.

In the late 1990s, I bought my first, really top-of-the-line computer, because I needed it for my business. I could even connect up to the Internet via my dial-up connection. I think I had a 500mb hard drive. My daughter's DS has a bigger hard drive than that computer, but at the time, I was pretty psyched about how much computer power I had at my finger tips.

The thing is, back in those days, the Internet was brand new, computer games were, well, computer games and no one expected the animation to look real (anyone remember the ascii character computer games? Anyone even know what an ascii character is anymore?). There was no Facebook, and the equivalent was a forum or chatroom.

But we still managed to find all sorts of uses for computers. I used mine, primarily, for typing. I've operated a home business since 1998, and I've used a computer for all of my work-related tasks from typing the actual documents to keeping my business records.

I've also used my computer for other record-keeping tasks related to my children's homeschooling. I have pictures - both snapshots of them in our daily lives to scanned images of things they've drawn - journals, yearbook pages, worksheets and coloring pages I can print out for them to do, schedules, letters to the state ... you name it. If it's about homeschooling, it's probably on my computer.

Over the years, I've used my computer for other tasks, like storing music files, and at one point, a few years ago, we started phasing out CDs in favor of digital music players, and I started transferring all of my music onto my computer. I have hundreds of hours of music, including some pretty adorable recordings of my daughters singing when they were small.

Modern computers have an amazing storage capacity, especially when compared to what I had as a college student. In fact, I still have some of my college papers stored on my computer. The files have been transferred from 5 1/4" floppy to 3 1/2" floppy disk to hard drive and translated from one word processing program to the next many times over the years. In addition, I have downloaded, what could be very important, e-books, like Hesperian's Where There is No Dentist. While I store e-books, Deus Ex Machina has been storing "survival videos" on his computer.

Most of the stuff I have on my computer, and about half the stuff I do on my computer in an average day has nothing to do with the Internet.

Wait ... what? You mean you can use a computer without the Internet?!?!

Which brings me to the point of this post and how it relates to preparedness for a lower energy future.

No one needs a computer to survive. In fact, if the EMP people are correct, and TEOTWAWKI comes about suddenly as a result of an EMP attack, nothing electronic will work, anyway. If it didn't work, or if I had no way to keep it powered up, I'd tuck the computer into a drawer and forget about it.

That said, my overall preparedness plan includes some way to generate small amounts of electricity, not because I'm hoping to stay connected via the Internet. When the grid goes down, so too, will the Internet, and even as dim as I am, I know that. Keeping my laptop powered has nothing to do with any hope that I might be able to stay in contact with my blog readers or my Facebook friends, and everything to do with the vast amount of pretty important information that's available on this little machine.

And I'm pretty sure that our bicycle generator - as long as we can keep it running - will be enough to power the laptop so that we can have access to what's stored on it.